Memory-mapped I/O provides advantages in speed of operation of operating system software for loading of data or code from main storage into computer memory (RAM). A problem occurs since some operating systems do not support a memory-mapped file I/O architecture. Certain users of these operating systems have large read only (R/O) files, e.g., databases that have to be read into memory in order to be processed and are immediately paged back out to a paging file or partition by the operating system. This is very slow and requires a considerable amount of disk space.
A solution to this problem would be to have a true memory-mapped I/O file system, but to implement this would require extensive development cost and time in order to re-program the operating system. Therefore, there is a need in the art for providing an ability for operating systems, which normally do not support memory-mapped I/O file architecture, to provide such a capability.